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'India has adopted CMM faster than any other nation'

Widely regarded as the guru of the capability maturity model, Dr Bill Curtis, co-founder and chief scientist of TeraQuest Metrics, was recently in Madras to address seminar organised by the CII-Southern Region on People-Capability Maturity Model, or P-CMM.

Dr Curtis is recognised as an authority on software development and human factors in computer systems ever since he was the director of the process program at the Software Engineering Institute, Pittsburgh, USA.

After developing Software CMM, he became the architect of the People CMM, which extends the scope of the software CMM to cover processes related to hiring, developing, training, motivating and retaining world-class work force.

Dr Curtis spoke to Shobha Warrier on Software CMM and P-CMM, their application in various industries, and how various countries have adopted the model.

Curtis is certain that the companies that have adopted the model will come out of the lean period successfully.

Earlier, there were many doubts over CMM. How did you get the software industry accept the model finally?

Software CMM was originally developed at the request of the United States Department of Defense, which is the sponsor of the Software Engineering Institute (Pittsburgh, USA) and they felt they had to have a way to evaluate the capabilities of people engaged in software work.

They usually took the lowest bidder because they had no idea what it would take to do the work. And, they started using the Software CMM to evaluate the capability of the contractors.

By 1994, the US Air Force had conducted a study that pretty much proved that higher maturity organisations that had got to Level 2 get things done on schedule. That convinced the Department of Defense.

Commercial industry was a little bit slow, and the Aerospace industry started picking it up too.

In India, the real signalling industry was Motorola in Bangalore. They used CMM internally to upgrade the software that they were building. This made others look at CMM.

The telecommunications industry was the next to use CMM. Thereafter it spread to other product companies. Now, it is also into financial institutions.

The impression is that CMM is only for the IT sector. Is there any difference between the CMM that is implemented in the software industry and in others?

No, there is no difference at all.

Is it as a complement to Software CMM that you developed People CMM?

Exactly. Way back in 1991-92, companies that were using Software CMM and doing assessments used to call back and say, 'See we have done our assessment and we found out that there are problems in project management, and integration management'.

And, these are things that we didn't talk about -- lack of training, compensation problems and retention hassles.

It was absolutely clear that there needed to be a complement.

We talked about the people-practices and how to build those to support the kind of gains that were being made on the process side.

The deeper we got to the problem of the software industry, the driving issue became acquisition of new talent, retention of existing talent, reduction of turnover and voluntary turnover.

That really lead to the adoption of People CMM -- especially in India, where turnover rate is quite high.

A lot of high maturity companies are finding that the People CMM is the second leg of a foundation that helps them sustain the gains that they made in installing high maturity practices.

They have the process capabilities as well as the people capable of executing the processes.

People CMM will ensure that a lot of companies installing the model primarily do so as a strategic step.

Customers' requirements change, business needs change and then, it becomes necessary to re-tool their work force to assume speed and meet the challenges.

And People CMM, especially at higher levels give them the capabilities to rapidly adjust to strategic demands.

The components of P-CMM give what the workforce needs to enable them to commit to new goals and directions.

So, it is really necessary to complement Software CMM with People CMM?

It certainly helps; there is no question about it.

You said People CMM is all about recruiting, developing, training, motivating and retaining world class work force. In India there is no scarcity of work force. Under the circumstances will People CMM work?

It will. There is more to People CMM than just retaining the work force. Lots of companies with large work force are using People CMM, and most companies with large work force are doing it centre by centre.

To find out whether HR practices are functioning well, in some cases, we have to first assess the corporate practices and then that of the units.

Tata Consultancy Services is doing just that, and it is working very well. We may soon adopt this as an alternative in the standard method.

Is it relevant during the lean period also?

Well, the lean period will not last forever. When you come out of such a situation, you got to make sure that you have the right work force who would be able to handle the business that starts growing.

For this you will have to make sure that even during the lean period, you retain the staff that you will need later.

When your business starts growing, it may not be in the direction that it was growing earlier. So, you need to have the capabilities in place to re-tool rapidly in order to move on.

Do you feel People CMM is more relevant to the software industry as it is brain-centric?

I like the word, brain-centric. That is exactly how we see it. We have designed it for knowledge-intense organisations, and software is the most knowledge-intensive industry.

The product of the software industry is called knowledge. So, it certainly fits. And, software industry is the first to adopt it because they had the experience of Software CMM.

They understood it. High maturity organisations that had their practices in place found that this complements what they are trying to do.

But this would be appropriate to almost any business where knowledge is critical.

Frankly, our belief is it will be applicable to any organisation.

When we did the first assessment at the Software Engineering Institute, we applied it on everyone in the building. It seems to be just as appropriate for people like secretaries and others where you wouldn't ordinarily think the work is knowledge intensive. But if you watch what modern secretaries do, you will find that they are using Microsoft Office, etc, and they require quite a bit of knowledge.

So, even jobs you don't think of as intense knowledge work also need tremendous knowledge.

What about the manufacturing industry? Is it important to practice People CMM there?

Absolutely. We have seen in many places that they stop hiring unskilled labour in manufacturing plants. If people didn't have high school degrees, they couldn't have necessary skills to programme machines because more and more machines are having automatic components.

How do various countries look at the capability maturity models?

India, more than any other country, has adopted it rapidly. It has also been adopted in the US and in Europe, but not quite as rapidly.

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